http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36185/Report_Norwegian_Retailer_Pulls_Violent_Games_In_Wake_Of_Attack.php



from gamasutra article



"Media reports indicate retailer Coop Norway will cease to carry 51 gaming and toy brands following attacks that killed 77 in a government building and youth camp.

Danish site Gamers Globe reports (translation) that the removal includes first-person shooters Homefront, Sniper Ghost Warrior, Counter-Strike Source, and the Call of Duty series, as well as popular MMO World of Warcraft."

It was highlighted in the news that he played a "war game" and that they thought it was a factor that had driven him into doing these horrible things. That war game turned out to be World of Warcraft ... One of my uni lecturers was interviewed on the radio and the first thing he said was, "World of Warcraft is not a war game" as well as that these events had not changed his opinion about this game. Apparently hard to comprehend when there's "war" in the name, eh?


Thoughts goes to the victims and those affected in the aftermath of these events.

They said they would retaliate with more democracy and freedom... Good job.

Related thought experiment - make a list of games that are not about murder.

1. FreeCell
2. Minesweeper
3. um....

Even Minecraft in normal mode is about weapons and killing.

World of Warcraft is not a war game[/quote]

Think about people playing it. Go to a forum and look at pvp threads: "red = dead", chanted over and over. There are gamers who know what this means, but for majority of population, it's downright scary. 12 year olds making such indiscriminate statements does come through as worrying.

Or an alternate example - what if the same kid had a notebook drawings full of nothing but decapitated rodents. And that's he'd be in a group of like-minded that does nothing but draws and exchanges pictures like that. It's virtual, it harms nobody, it has no effect, they aren't really harming real animals and it's even practicing drawing skills.

Wouldn't it come across as a bit creepy and troubling.

First of all I haven't seen "red = dead" in a very long time and it's most certainly not chanted. But if you do read it, yes, it can come across as a bit over the top, but do you think they actually read these forums? I doubt they made the effort to check when the title described a world where you craft war, let alone get suspicious about the language as a whole when half of the words they could understand because it's game-specific/gaming vocabulary.

EDIT: Yes I do dislike the media's way of approaching this case as a whole. I acknowledge them as a crucial way to get information out to the people. I cannot, however, help but to get insanely annoyed with them when they are interviewing survivors from Utøya right after the event and asking, "You're shaking, how do you feel?" I hope that makes sense.

well done, they secured the country now.

First of all I haven't seen "red = dead" in a very long time and it's most certainly not chanted. But if you do read it, yes, it can come across as a bit over the top, but do you think they actually read these forums?

Well, I've seen it all the time during playing WoW when people discussed player-killing. I think they meant that "people of the opposite faction are kill-on-site" but most probably have no idea that it has a political meaning originally..

Aimless action, as usual.

France and Germany are probably the best populations to prove how irrational and absurd the allegions of violence in games and movies causing violence in real life are (being direct neighbours with a long common history, sharing Elass as a "mixed" region, and probably being less alien to each other than most other pairs of countries).
Still, what's considered suitable for children of age 12 in France is usually first censored and then rated either 16+ or 18+ in Germany. This extends even to movies that were explicitly targetted at "family+kid", such as for example Adèle Blanc-Sec. Which, frankly, is typical for us Nazis. We just can't allow someone to decide for himself, we have to control what you see, what you do, and what you think.

Yet, despite of the censoring, there is more capital crime and there are more amok runs in Germany than in France.

Well, I've seen it all the time during playing WoW when people discussed player-killing. I think they meant that "people of the opposite faction are kill-on-site" but most probably have no idea that it has a political meaning originally..

You need to find a new guild, man

By this logic we should ban MS Word, since the killer was obsessed with that too. Who knows, it could have driven him over the top...